


watching the world pass us by

by Blake



Category: Cars (Pixar Movies)
Genre: Anyways, CoC, Established Relationship, F/F, Humanized Cars, Lesbian Cars, Mentions of Racism, New Relationship Feels, They love each other so much, but mostly just cuteness, but neither of them is very good at road trips, cars of color, cruz is a menace, i can't stop writing road trip fics, lesbian doc hudson, lesbian lightning mcqueen, natalie is cautious, road trip fic, so many lesbian cars, some odd couple vibes, they will probably adopt five cats together, this is about their first trip to radiator springs together
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-03-23
Updated: 2020-03-23
Packaged: 2021-02-28 20:48:35
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,950
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23283517
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Blake/pseuds/Blake
Summary: It’s really not until she feels herself clutching the passenger door handle and bracing her feet on imaginary brakes that Natalie realizes they’ve never really drivenanywheretogether. They’ve never had a reason to. Their dates pretty much consist of sex, cuddling, eating cereal, more sex, maybe some Netflix show, more sex, andmaybea trip to the taqueria down the block from Natalie’s apartment.
Relationships: Natalie Certain/Cruz Ramirez
Comments: 6
Kudos: 13





	watching the world pass us by

**Author's Note:**

  * For [BendItLikeBeckham](https://archiveofourown.org/users/BendItLikeBeckham/gifts).



Natalie has spent months analyzing, describing, and predicting Cruz’s driving for audiences everywhere, but somehow, she’s not prepared for the sheer terror that is the first five minutes of their first road trip together. Natalie didn’t even know her little Passat could go 95mph, and she didn’t know it was possible to go 95mph on I-210 without getting pulled over immediately.

It’s really not until she feels herself clutching the passenger door handle and bracing her feet on imaginary brakes that she realizes they’ve never really driven _anywhere_ together. They’ve never had a reason to. Their dates pretty much consist of sex, cuddling, eating cereal, more sex, maybe some Netflix show, more sex, and _maybe_ a trip to the taqueria down the block from Natalie’s apartment.

“Could you pull over to a gas station real quick?” Natalie usually avoids being an indirect communicator, but she’s just not sure they’re in the stage of their relationship yet where she can say, “ _Pull over and let me drive, you maniac_ ,” without it just sounding like aimless flirting.

“What?” Cruz shouts over the dance music tearing through the speakers.

Natalie lets go of the edge of her seat just long enough to reach over and turn the volume dial down. “Gas station stop, please?”

Cruz turns her head to look away from traffic and at Natalie. The warm burst in Natalie’s heart at Cruz’s wide, excited, white-toothed grin almost distracts her from the certainty that death is imminent. “Yes. Road trip snacks,” Cruz announces with utmost seriousness, clearly assuming that they’re on the same page, which they are not.

At the gas station, Natalie asks for a bottle of water, which earns her a cheeky smirk from Cruz as she walks into the minimart, clearly taking her request as some sort of code. In her absence, Natalie tops off the tank, sanitizes her hands, and then shuts herself in the driver’s seat.

When Cruz comes back, she makes a startled face at Natalie through the windshield. It _could_ be the good kind of startled, the _pleasant surprise_ kind, instead of the _betrayed_ kind. Natalie kicks her one-inch pumps off and sets her bare feet to the pedals, preparing a speech about why she wants to drive. _It’s not you, it’s me. Of course I love your driving. Of course I trust you with my life. I just…_ Maybe there’s a genetic condition she could cite that is triggered by going over the speed limit. Maybe she should cite the fact that just having one black person in the car makes them twice as likely to get pulled over, no matter how much Cruz is used to getting away with speeding.

Maybe, just maybe, she’s overanalyzing again.

Cruz hops into the passenger seat, making the whole car bounce with the impact. “Cool, you’re driving?” she says before dumping ten packs of candy onto Natalie’s lap.

“Yes.” Natalie pushes the candy into the cup holders in the center console. She prefers salty snacks, not sweet, and she would have thought Cruz would know that after all their post-coital midnight foraging sessions. But she didn’t really want any snacks anyways, so it’s not really fair for her to feel anything about it. “If that’s alright.”

“You’re so hot,” Cruz replies. When Natalie looks over at her, her face goes red and hides her face in the drawstring hoodie of her sweatshirt, which is actually Natalie’s sweatshirt, a relic from her sorority days that Cruz insists is insanely comfortable. “I can’t look at you,” she says, voice muffled. “You’re too beautiful. I’ll burst into flames.”

Even after two months together, it’s still exhilarating to be found attractive by the exact the kind of person Natalie wants to be attractive to. For years, other lesbians have assumed she’s unavailable and ugly straight men have assumed she’s _available_ , and all along that whole endless, lonely road, all she has wanted is to have a cute girl in her bed telling her how hot she is while they cuddle. The addictive amazingness of the sex and the fact that she can’t take her hands off of Cruz and the incredible way Cruz tastes have all been unexpected bonuses. Pleasant surprises.

Natalie leans in to kiss the small circle of forehead peeking out through Cruz’s hoodie. The rest of Cruz’s face appears pretty quickly at that, and then Natalie kisses her lips, too. She tastes so damn good, even with a sour gummy room still half-chewed in the pocket of her cheek.

The honk of the car behind them is the only thing that keeps them from making out for more than a couple minutes— _Ten_ minutes, Natalie realizes when she pulls away and glances at the clock. Time just flies when they’re kissing. Her estimations are almost always off when it comes to Cruz. It would be kind of terrifying, if it weren’t also the best thing in her whole life.

~~~

As it turns out, the only thing Cruz is worse at than driving in traffic is being a passenger.

Her leg won’t stop jostling up and down, no matter how much Natalie squeezes her thigh. Maybe her impact would be greater if Natalie was squeezing her thigh with the intent of stopping its jostling, and not just because it felt so good in her hand.

Her other leg is propped up, her shoe getting dust all over the dashboard. She’s biting her nails and squirming like a kid. The shoulder strap of her seatbelt is behind her. She’s chewing sour straws with her mouth open, loud enough to be heard over the Frank Ocean CD Natalie put on when they drove out of range of the LA radio stations.

“Can we take a pee break?”

Natalie’s not exactly surprised when Cruz asks. Based on all the impatient body language, she’s been expecting Cruz to try to trick her into giving up the driver’s seat for the last fifty miles.

“Sure.” Natalie moves into the right lane of the two-lane interstate and immediately has to brake to keep from hitting a truck. Cruz picks up her hand and kisses the back of her wrist. It calms Natalie’s nerves, makes her think maybe Cruz really _does_ just need the bathroom.

But when they get to the gas station, Cruz jumps out of the car and, instead of running to the minimart, says, “I’ll gas up!” and runs over to re-fill the almost-full tank.

Natalie stays put, suspicious that the second she stands up, her spot will be stolen.

Soon, Cruz opens the door and leans her arm over the frame, leaning in and looking down at her with her soft, wet smile snagged by the edge of her teeth in a way that makes Natalie think of things that aren’t appropriate for gas stations.

“Scooch over, I’ll take the wheel for a while,” Cruz proposes, as though it’s an honestly selfless offer, as though she’s not going stir-crazy in the passenger’s seat, as though she’s not going to weave through two-lane traffic at reckless-endangerment speeds.

Instead of answering, Natalie cups the back of her head and pulls her down into a kiss, so she can feel Cruz’s teeth snagging _her_ smile. She gropes Cruz’s solid waist and goes breathless at the sweep of Cruz’s palms down the sides of her neck.

No one honks their horn that time, but there’s a sharp whistle nearby that may or may not be addressed at them. Despite the rude awakening, Cruz pulls back with a haze of stars glossing her eyes and walks back to the passenger seat, having completely forgotten her offer to drive.

~~~

California is so much wider than Natalie realized. She was born and raised in LA, and her job with ESPN keeps her in Burbank most of the time, with the exception of the races she is flown to in private planes. She never had reason to drive past Palm Springs. She had kind of subconsciously assumed that Palm Springs was the most eastern point of the state. It sure looked like the end of a road to nowhere.

But it feels like it’s taking ages to get to the Arizona border. The hours stretch on as the cactuses grow taller, the mountains hide more of the sun, and the dirt grows redder. Her tailbone is starting to hurt. Her left leg is starting to jostle. She hasn’t been in a car for this long since the year she commuted to Burbank while still living on the west side.

“Do you need a pee break?” Cruz asks hopefully, apparently having remembered her schemes to get the steering wheel back.

“No.” Natalie answers, but she feels a distinct burning sensation as soon as the thought passes through her head. Cruz is good. She’s really good.

Natalie stops at the next gas station. In the bathroom, she hears a woman say, “I love Texas. I love their justice system,” which makes her feel very, very _not in Kansas anymore_ , so to speak. Even if they’re still in California. She didn’t know people in California even said things like that.

She waits for the woman and her friend to leave before she creeps out of the stall to wash her hands and run as fast as her heels can take her back to the car. Cruz is grinning at her from the driver’s seat, but speeding away from this place at twenty miles over the limit doesn’t sound like such a bad idea right about now. She slips into the passenger seat, buckles her seatbelt, and says, “Go. Just go.”

Once they’re on the freeway and she’s faced with the task of distracting herself from Cruz’s reckless driving again, she starts up conversation. “Do we really _have_ to drive to Arizona?”

Cruz’s jaw drops, then clenches. Natalie regrets her words immediately, but before she can take them back, Cruz answers, “Well, no, of course not. I just—I mean, I wanted you to meet—But like, of course, we—We can—”

“I do want to meet them, of course I do,” Natalie assures her. Aside from Natalie’s mouth and her long legs, Cruz’s favorite conversation topic is her lesbian mentors, Lightning McQueen and her partner, Doc Hudson. Natalie didn’t exactly get into the racing statistician business by being an avid Piston Cup fan, but she knows enough about lesbian history to know who Doc Hudson is, and she knows enough about closeted gay celebrities to know Lightning McQueen as a bad-girl, chaotic bisexual stereotype. But Cruz talks about them like they’re real people, like they’re important people to her. And the fact that she wants Natalie to meet them before they even meet each other’s families must mean a lot.

It’s just that the further they get from LA, the scarier the world starts to look for two lesbian women of color in a car together, and Natalie’s head is really starting to run the statistics of all the things that could go wrong, rather than the things that are supposed to go right.

“Have you spent much time out here, in the country? Or the desert? Wherever we are?” Natalie asks as Cruz weaves between two trucks to pass an SUV.

“No. It’s my first time.” Cruz shifts in her seat and looks up through the top of the windshield at the mountains closing them in. Natalie’s not used to her looking nervous.

“It’s okay, I’ve got you,” she whispers. Cruz must hear her, because she looks over at her and smiles. “If it’s good enough for McQueen and Doc Hudson, it must be good enough for us,” she says, not sure if she’s reassuring Cruz or herself.

~~~

One by one, Natalie has pushed half a bag of sour patch kids into Cruz’s mouth. It’s worth it for the kiss her fingers get, and the sticky, unconscious smile on Cruz’s face when she gets a green one. Natalie finds herself hoarding the green ones just so she can predict when she’ll make Cruz smile like that. It makes her stomach twist in total happiness.

“OK, I have to pee,” Cruz announces, not sounding so excited this time. Natalie realizes Cruz hasn’t actually gone to any of the bathrooms they’ve stopped at, too busy fighting this unspoken battle over the steering wheel.

At the gas station, Natalie slides over into the driver’s seat while Cruz is gone, as if not opening the door will somehow make what she has done less obvious.

Cruz comes running out of the bathroom, waving her arms, which Natalie takes as a signal to start the engine. “Go,” Cruz directs once she’s buckled into the passenger’s seat. Natalie drives and gets on the freeway before she even asks what happened.

“I saw two Trump-Pence stickers. I thought I was going to get deported, oh my god.”

Instead of making her feel vindicated in her unease and her discomfort with this whole Arizona trip, this statement just fills Natalie with equal parts sadness and protective fury.

She sees signs for the Arizona border in two miles and swerves to take the next exit.

“What are you doing?” Cruz asks.

Natalie just drives into the parking lot of the first gas station and turns off the engine. She turns and kisses Cruz, pulling her lips between her own and licking the taste of sour candy off of her.

Cruz kisses back like she never questioned Natalie’s choice to pull over in the first place.

With a hand on the curve of Cruz’s jaw, Natalie pulls back and looks into her brown eyes, lit red by the setting sun. “Cruz, you drive way too fast, and I hate the way you weave in traffic, and you’re the most agitating passenger I’ve ever had in my car, and I really, really don’t want my insurance rates to go up because of your driving, and I really don’t like sour candy.” She pauses to catch her breath, while Cruz just keeps looking at her, expression unchanging. “But I love you. I love you so much, and I’d make out in front of Trump-Pence voters just to show them you’re mine, and I’d have sex with you here in this very—” She pauses again to swallow, not really sure she’s actually going to say the words— “gas station bathroom, because this belongs just as much to us as it does to—those people,” she finishes, waving a hand around at the various white folks buying potato chips while they gas up their SUVs.

Cruz looks into her eyes for a long minute without saying anything. Then, “Is it because I’m hot?”

It throws Natalie a little. Cruz always throws her predictions. “I mean—You mean, I’ll have sex with you in a gas station bathroom because you’re hot? I guess…”

Cruz laughs a little, tightening her grip on Natalie’s elbows. “No, I mean, am I an agitating passenger because I distract you with how much you want to bang me?”

Natalie crumbles a little under the pressure of Cruz’s small hands on her arms, but that doesn’t completely stop her from being baffled that of all the things she just confessed, _that’s_ the thing Cruz wants to talk about. “Maybe you’re an agitating passenger because you _know_ you’re hot.” Natalie thumbs across Cruz’s soft lower lip, grumbling at how right she always manages to be.

Cruz slips her arms around Natalie’s middle, pulling her close over the center console. “Maybe I’m intentionally a bad driver because I know you’ll think it’s hot,” she suggests.

But that’s just pushing it too far. “Nice try,” Natalie says sternly, though she’s secretly melting with relief that they can _talk_ about this stuff and nobody’s getting upset.

“Then why did you offer me gas station bathroom sex?” Cruz asks, attempting to cock one eyebrow but just making a funny face instead. Natalie lets herself laugh.

“Because I want you to feel good about this trip,” she says earnestly.

A shadow passes over them as someone walks past their car in the evening light. They both turn their heads nervously to look, but nobody seems to be paying them attention.

Cruz brings her attention back by grabbing her hands and jostling them, holding their palms close and warm. “I want you to feel good about this trip, too,” she says, as though it’s part of a debate argument. It makes Natalie think about the ways she might be preventing herself from feeling good about this trip, like offering to do things she’s not quite one-hundred-percent comfortable with, like gas station bathroom sex, like attempting to drive seven hours all by herself.

Cruz’s eyes light up after Natalie looks into them for a minute, almost as though she can tell that Natalie is deciding to let her drive. “I won’t drive more than ten over the speed limit, I promise,” Cruz says, words tumbling out fast the way they do when she’s excited. “I’ll even go the speed limit if you need me to.”

Natalie is touched by the offer, but compromise goes both ways. “You can go over. I’ll let you know if it’s too fast,” she promises, watching the pink split of Cruz’s lips over her grin.

“Okay, good, because I want to get us to Doc and Lightning’s alleged guest bedroom as soon as I can.” Cruz drops that and then runs out and around the front of the car without waiting for a reaction. Natalie feels heat seep into her body, knowing that in just a few hours, she’ll be safe with Cruz in a bed with no one to answer to but each other. No matter how badly Cruz drives, it will be worth it.


End file.
